Since Barack Obama’s name turned up in that computer seized from FARC terrorists by Colombia, Investor’s Business Daily has a few questions for him: Obama And FARC.

Obama hasn’t said a whole lot about Colombia other than to criticize President Bush’s good relations with President Uribe. With this correspondence suggesting that FARC knows what he thinks, maybe the American voters have a right to know what he thinks, too. Five questions come to mind:

Is it true Obama would cut off Plan Colombia military aid to our ally, which would serve the terrorist group FARC’s interests?

Does Obama still oppose a free trade agreement for Colombia, even though that puts him on the same side as FARC in the debate?

Does Obama know or care that one of his staffers or supporters is claiming to disclose his positions in secret meetings with FARC terrorists outside government channels?

Can he tell us why his supporters would pass on such information to terrorists, and what he or she could gain from it?

Will Obama, as president, treat FARC as the serious terrorists they are, given that they still hold three Americans hostage?

The homeschoolers I have met will supplement their teaching by going to lectures by certified/degree holding persons.They will have persons with degree’s in englich or literature come in for a four or five week stint to teach harder to grasp concepts in both, or to teach the Greek plays and the like.Typically, to save and pool money, there are groups of homeschool parents that put their resources together and meet as larger groups with their kids while these concepts are taught.Almost like a small classroom, just at someone’s house or at a public place.

These kids, when they go off to college are way more intelligent and have a stronger grasp of their faith, psychological makeup, history, science, literature, languages, grammar, and the like, verses a public school student – who is dumbed down and must go to college to get what was taught in high school 50-years back.German, or Latin, French or some language is also taught.These kids are smart… and this is what the state want (I think) to curb.

They want dumbed down Darwinists running around being a good little statist, talking about secularism, talking about sex-ed and how great “alternative lifestyles” are.This is what is at the core of this legal battle that will be a stepping stone to curbing in home education that not all lifestyles are equal both morally and healthfully.California is becoming like Canada in baby steps where pastors have been fined and arrested and harassed by the authorities for preaching the Bible’s own words about homosexuality.

A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.

The homeschooling movement never saw the case coming.

"At first, there was a sense of, 'No way,' " said homeschool parent Loren Mavromati, a resident of Redondo Beach (Los AngelesCounty) who is active with a homeschool association. "Then there was a little bit of fear. I think it has moved now into indignation."

The ruling arose from a child welfare dispute between the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Philip and Mary Long of Lynwood, who have been homeschooling their eight children. Mary Long is their teacher, but holds no teaching credential.

The parents said they also enrolled their children in Sunland Christian School, a private religious academy in Sylmar (Los Angeles County), which considers the Long children part of its independent study program and visits the home about four times a year.

The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that California law requires parents to send their children to full-time public or private schools or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home…

I want to share a story by a person who decided to homeschool (actually supplement a portion of what the public doesn't teach) his kid.Very insightful. It is by an astronomer/scientist that will be pulling his kid out of school as well as teaching some homeshooled kids an area where the parents lack:

It’s no surprise to me that Colorado’s public school system is not good. I mean, I’m a product of the Boulder Valley School District and I can tell you first hand that it’s not great at preparing one for college, or anything for that matter.

So, it shouldn’t come as a big shock to me that I need to pick up the slack for what my sons are NOT learning about science in school.

My first experience with just how bad things were occurred back in the early 1990’s. I was giving a presentation to some 5th graders when I asked the question: “When did the United States first land a man on the moon?”

No one raised their hand. In fact, most didn’t know we had ever been to the moon, and of those that did know, a substantial fraction doubted that we were there at all (parents were probably moon-landing-hoaxers).

And I have a TON of stories like that.

Fast forward to this last school year. My 7th grade son is a very good student, gets A’s in just about everything. He LOVES science, especially astronomy (imagine that) and he and I have great conversations about what the universe is like and what it’s like to be a scientist. He eats that stuff up so I know he does his best in his science class.

Yet, throughout all of last year, his grade in science was C-. In every report card.

He was devastated because he knew how important science is to me and he always thought he knew science better than all of his classmates (and I agree with him, I’ve met some of those kids. Let’s just say critical thinking doesn’t come naturally to them).

Getting that C- consistently really took a toll on him, he couldn’t understand what was going on. He really knows his stuff and always scored well on tests.

Naturally, I talked to the teacher to investigate.

It turns out my son IS a good student, DID understand the material and WAS way ahead of the other students in his comprehension of the material.

BUT, he couldn’t organize his science notebook.

“I’m sorry, he can’t organize what?”, I asked.

“His science notebook. He failed the notebook checks. They were worth 100 points each, almost 80 percent of his grade.”, the science teacher calmly explained with a huge smirk on her face.

“What does that have to do with science?”, I asked, but by then I knew what was going on and that I wasn’t about to get anywhere. I left the teacher conference furious.

I’m all too familiar with this kind of teacher. She was a stickler for organization. All materials had to be inserted in the notebooks EXACTLY and each item had to have the name in a certain place, with the information outlined EXACTLY as specified.

Now, I understand the need to teach kids organizational skills, I really do. But to make it 80% of a grade?

What this teacher really wanted was the students to do all of her work for her. She didn’t want to have to search through reams of paper to try and figure out what the student knew. She just wanted to open the notebook and start checking off the existence of items, each containing the proper words so she could get through the grading as fast as possible.

She wasn’t the slightest bit interested in whether or not the kids learned anything, only that the notebooks were in proper order.

This isn’t all though folks, not by a long shot. I mean, I could let that go if that were the only issue because he would get a different, and hopefully more competent teacher next year.

But in Colorado, all students are required to take the Colorado Student Aptitude Test (CSAP), as part of the Leave Every Child Behind Act. This means that all school year until March, but especially from January to March, my kids are getting immersed in that test. The teachers do NOTHING ELSE but teach that test.

Then, after March, when the pressure is off, the teachers pretty much coast through April, May and the first part of June. This is the only time when my kids have a real chance at getting a useful education, and it’s wasted because “Whew, we’re done with that test.”

The CSAP is the only thing that is actually measured, so everything else, like the actual education itself, is ignored.

I simply cannot allow my kids to come out of the education system in Colorado without learning basic science and developing their critical thinking skills. As a parent, I take full responsibility for my kids education, so I’ll do it myself.

So, every Tuesday and Thursday of the next school year, I’ll be pulling my then 8th grade son out of class for his last period (along with his friend and three other homeschooled students) and teaching them science.

How can I do this? Why would the school let me take the boys out like that every week? Because so long as the boys are in class for a certain percentage of the school day, the school gets the credit for them and they get paid. The principal told me that’s all they care about: getting paid. I could do whatever I wanted with them in science as long as they met certain minimum knowledge standards.

Standards they do NOT hold themselves to, by the way.

No problem though, I can meet those just by spending one hour in front a telescope with them.

The two days I’ll have them at home will be spent teaching, discussing and working on science topics with assignments to do on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I picked those two days to meet because of the seemingly infinite number of three day weekends the kids get in school for ‘planning days’ and other holidays. This would minimize any missed days due to that bullsh*t.

So now, I get to spend the rest of my summer planning a science curriculum for my son and his friends. You can bet it’ll be heavy on astronomy, but I can guarantee you that, based on what I’ve seen so far, they’ll be WAY ahead of their classmates by the time I’m done with them.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

I am linking two stories below, one is to show that having armed students is a good thing and American universities (and seminaries) should want such trained students to be packing!The other is to just show the animal instincts of the people whom Israel faces.

An armed student at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem said he shot dead a terrorist who moments earlier had entered the institute's library, where about 80 people were gathered, and opened fire. Israeli rescue services said eight were killed and at least 10 were wounded.

Yitzhak Dadon, a student, said he was armed with a rifle and waited on the roof of a nearby building. "He came out of the library spraying automatic fire ... the terrorist came to the entrance and I shot him twice in the head, he said."

I wanted to piggy-back on an important site and the work this person has done. He has set out to study over a thousand weather stations where the government takes temperatures that have been used in the “scare” about Global Warming. As you will see, many of these weather stations (temperature taking apparatus) are in areas that reflect heat or have been built around with concrete and steel.

This site has a purpose, that is to study 1,200 (plus) stations:

The survey project continues to move forward, even in these cold and snowy winter months. I’m pleased to announce that we have just passed the 500 mark for surveyed stations. Now with 41.1% of the network surveyed comprising 502 stations surveyed so far, that leaves 719 to go out of 1221 stations nationwide.

What a task.

Not to mention that they are government run, so the calibration would be right on or would have been neglected for some time? I will let the reader come up with the most plausible answer to that.

Here are some photos with a short explanation… by-the-by, the site where this can be found at (in the links to the right of the main blog is:

This first site has some commentary from Whats Up With That researcher, enjoy... and may I add that if one stays long enough another factor that would play in this station being way off would be when the guys and gals are out washing down their firetrucks (and the like).

One of the things that happens when your work becomes well known is that people send you things to look at. Such is the case for today’s subject. Here we have a NOAA COOP station which is on the side of a mountain, well away from large cities. Only problem is, they put it right next to a parking lot.

A reader of this blog, Brad Herrick, sent me these photos of the Mt.Charleston weather station on State Route 157 west of Las Vegas. For those that don’t know, Mt.Charleston is the large mountain to the west that overlooks Las Vegas. NOAA lists it on it’s COOP-A list, meaning that it reports for the climatic database. It’s been in operation since 1949. Its been moved 3 times, but all within about 1/2 mile as the fire station changed and grew.

Seems pretty rural, with a mental image of “way up in the mountains” if you were researching this station. By James Hansen’s figuring, it would also be a “lights=0″ station since I doubt there is municipal street lighting for this area.

Except for a few houses, it certainly looks “rural”. Any researcher at NCDC or maybe a university that might use this station in some research report would certainly think this station was well away from the building/concrete/asphalt influence of bustling Las Vegas wouldn’t they?

But then we see this:

And this:

And This

Unfortunately, I don’t have a time series temperature graph of this station to show you since I haven’t found a place at NCDC yet to graph COOP stations that are COOP-A. If anybody knows of such a link, please let me know.

There’s nothing like convenient parking to convert a rural station to urban. But lets not forget the maintenance of the Stevenson Screen roof (see pic #2 -large), hillside, shade bushes, fire station building revisions, and portable storage unit. When did all that happen? We have no idea.

Surely, it’s easy to disentangle all that from the temperature record. Quick! Somebody create an adjustment equation.

Lampasas, TX., this weather station was found to be tucked between a building, and two parking lots, one with nearby vehicles. According to the surveyor, it is right next to the ACE Hardware store on the main street of town. While likely representative of the temperature for downtown Lampasas, one wonders how well it measures the climate of the region.

Another shot.

Miami AZ., I do not think this one needs an explanation about how bad the temperature readings must be... um, hotter than they should be???
Another shot.Cedarville CA., looking east. Take note of the new Forest Service concrete pad for their offices.

Inside temperature structure.

Looking north. I am sure no heat radiates off the propane tanks.

Some great work on the part of this site. Holding the crazy enviro-whacker's to task as well as holding the government responsible for shoddy work!! Awesome!

You've no doubt seen the stories about strange snowfalls in Saudi Arabia. A brutal winter in China. The heaviest snow cover in North America, Siberia and elsewhere since 1966.

And if you are a vigilant observer of the global warming debate, you know how inconveniently cold it is in the Arctic this winter for Al Gore and his army of climate alarmists.

But how cold is it, Johnny?

Well, NASA says recent satellite images show that the allegedly endangered polar ice cap -- which will melt completely one of these summers and kill off all the polar bears if we don't slash our greedy carbon footprints and revert to the lifestyles of medieval peasants -- has recovered to near normal coverage levels.

That's what Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's GoddardSpaceFlightCenter in Maryland, told Canada's CBC News -- the Canadian government's version of NPR/PBS - on Feb. 12.

As far as Google's search engine knows, Comiso's comforting report has appeared nowhere but in Canada.

There's even better news for polar ice-pack lovers from ice expert Gilles Langis, who says Arctic ice is now even thicker than usual in spots. A senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, he's another scientist you shouldn't expect to see talking to Anderson Cooper on the next episode of CNN's "Galaxy in Peril."

Meanwhile, in other news too climatically incorrect for U.S. mainstream media to touch, California meteorologist Anthony Watts says January 2008 was the planet's second-coldest January in 15 years.

Even more shocking, the average temperature of Earth dropped significantly from January 2007 to January 2008. As Watts explains on his Web site wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com, he determined the lower figure by crunching data from four major public and private global tracking sources.

You may remember Watts from last summer. He popped up in this paper and on Fox News because of his self-funded project to quality-check 1,221 ground weather stations around the country that are used by NASA to measure the "official" average annual temperature of the United States.

So far, Watts and his volunteers have checked out more than 500 weather stations (none in Western Pennsylvania) to see if their temperature data can be considered credible. As he details on his other Web site, surfacestations.org, nearly 70 percent of the sites fail to meet the government's own standards because they are not 100 feet from a building, are on blazing rooftops, sit next to air-conditioner exhaust fans, etc.

Watts was shocked and surprised to find such unequivocal proof that Earth's temperature has cooled in the last year, he said to me Wednesday. But he's very cautious about what it means in either the short or long run.

Calling it a "fluctuation" and "a large anomaly" compared to the 30-year running temperature average that climatologists use, he emphasized that the cold spell is "no indication that global warming is over" but does "illustrate that the driving mechanisms behind our planet's climate are still very much in control of changing the climate and that the planet's not in the death grip of CO2 just yet."

A careful, honest man of science, all Watts would say for sure was that his findings and all the strange cold-weather events of this winter prove only one thing so far -- that "Mother Nature is still in control of things, not us."

Bill Steigerwald, born and raised in Pittsburgh, is a former L.A. Times copy editor and free-lancer who also worked as a docudrama researcher for CBS-TV in Hollywood before becoming an associate editor and columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

I am typically not a huge fan of Alan Dershowitz.His defense of legal positivism against Alan Keyes erudite slap down via natural law theory on C-Span was a reminder to me what is at stake in our culture war.But on Israel, Dershowitz is uncommonly good in his stance, which is a reminder: even liberals can get it at times. The above "cartoon" says a lot in my minds eye.

Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women's magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber.

At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: "if you're not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."

Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. The traditional paradigm was that mothers who love their children want them to live in peace, marry and produce grandchildren. Women in general, and mothers in particular, were seen as a counterweight to male belligerence. The picture of the mother weeping as her son is led off to battle -- even a just battle -- has been a constant and powerful image.

Now there is a new image of mothers urging their children to die, and then celebrating the martyrdom of their suicidal sons and daughters by distributing sweets and singing wedding songs. More and more young women -- some married with infant children -- are strapping bombs to their (sometimes pregnant) bellies, because they have been taught to love death rather than life. Look at what is being preached by some influential Islamic leaders:

"We are going to win, because they love life and we love death," said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: "[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah." Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death," explained Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader of the Global Islamic Youth Center in Sydney, Australia, preached: "We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid." Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech: "It is the zenith of honor for a man, a young person, boy or girl, to be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to serve the interests of his nation and his religion."

How should Western democracies fight against an enemy whose leaders preach a preference for death?

The two basic premises of conventional warfare have long been that soldiers and civilians prefer living to dying and can thus be deterred from killing by the fear of being killed; and that combatants (soldiers) can easily be distinguished from noncombatants (women, children, the elderly, the infirm and other ordinary citizens). These premises are being challenged by women like Zahra Maladan. Neither she nor her son -- if he listens to his mother -- can be deterred from killing by the fear of being killed. They must be prevented from succeeding in their ghoulish quest for martyrdom. Prevention, however, carries a high risk of error. The woman walking toward the group of soldiers or civilians might well be an innocent civilian. A moment's hesitation may cost innocent lives. But a failure to hesitate may also have a price.

Late last month, a young female bomber was shot as she approached some shops in central Baghdad. The Iraqi soldier who drew his gun hesitated as the bomber, hands raised, insisted that she wasn't armed. The soldier and a shop owner finally opened fire as she dashed for the stores; she was knocked to the ground but still managed to detonate the bomb, killing three and wounding eight. Had the soldier and other bystanders not called out a warning to others -- and had they not shot her before she could enter the shops -- the death toll certainly would have been higher. Had he not hesitated, it might have been lower.

As more women and children are recruited by their mothers and their religious leaders to become suicide bombers, more women and children will be shot at -- some mistakenly. That too is part of the grand plan of our enemies. They want us to kill their civilians, who they also consider martyrs, because when we accidentally kill a civilian, they win in the court of public opinion. One Western diplomat called this the "harsh arithmetic of pain," whereby civilian casualties on both sides "play in their favor." Democracies lose, both politically and emotionally, when they kill civilians, even inadvertently. As Golda Meir once put it: "We can perhaps someday forgive you for killing our children, but we cannot forgive you for making us kill your children."

Civilian casualties also increase when terrorists operate from within civilian enclaves and hide behind human shields. This relatively new phenomenon undercuts the second basic premise of conventional warfare: Combatants can easily be distinguished from noncombatants. Has Zahra Maladan become a combatant by urging her son to blow himself up? Have the religious leaders who preach a culture of death lost their status as noncombatants? What about "civilians" who willingly allow themselves to be used as human shields? Or their homes as launching pads for terrorist rockets?

The traditional sharp distinction between soldiers in uniform and civilians in nonmilitary garb has given way to a continuum. At the more civilian end are babies and true noncombatants; at the more military end are the religious leaders who incite mass murder; in the middle are ordinary citizens who facilitate, finance or encourage terrorism. There are no hard and fast lines of demarcation, and mistakes are inevitable -- as the terrorists well understand.

We need new rules, strategies and tactics to deal effectively and fairly with these dangerous new realities. We cannot simply wait until the son of Zahra Maladan -- and the sons and daughters of hundreds of others like her -- decide to follow his mother's demand. We must stop them before they export their sick and dangerous culture of death to our shores.

Mr. Dershowitz teaches law at HarvardUniversity and is the author of "Finding Jefferson" (Wiley, 2007).